Capitol Ideas: What's Duesberg Up To? Rediscovering the Cause of Cancer
Bethell, Tom
by Tom Bethell What's Duesberg Up To? Rediscovering the cause of cancer. p eter Ducsberg was packing dusty papers into boxes when I saw him. He was being moved from his lab on the 5th floor of...
...What's interesting is that Duesberg im, okes the fairly well understood mechanical processes of the cell, instead of diving down to the barely understood molecular level where "genes" and "mutation" function as oneword explanations for whatever is observed...
...If that turns out to be true, the implications for understanding cancer are vast...
...It doesn't take orders, and it has a passport to travel...
...But there are familiar echoes...
...Down's syndrome is caused by the addition of a single chromosome, so it is not hard to believe that too much of a good thing is not good at all...
...In 19o % Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller Institute found a retrovirus that caused tumors in chickens, and 50 years later another virus from monkey kidneys, SV4o, was found to have contaminated polio vaccine...
...We stopped off in a library, filled with bound volumcs of Cell, Nature, Biochemistry, and the Proceedings of the Natio~al Academy of Sciences...
...been focused on a single theory for the last z 5 }ears, most of it funded by the federal go\ernmcut, and it is in fact an erroneous theory, Duesberg believes...
...He likens this sometimes to a suspension bridge, sometimes to a bow and arrow, sometimes to a violin...
...As I walked with him one day recently across the campus toward the undergraduate lab building, he told me that the gene and aneuploidy theories make different predictions...
...Valentine One resisted all false alornts front other detectors, C/D found...
...Through the "crude" light microscope they just can't see the chromosomal forest for the genes...
...Since then, more than 7 ~ other genes are said to become "oncogenes" if mutated...
...Mutating" individual workers--replacing one with another who works harder--won't change things much if the other workers maintain the old rate...
...LrIWho really has 360-degree protection...
...AIDS came along just as the viral-cancer program was faltering...
...Some are, some are not true cancers...
...was the German researcher Theodor Boveri, who described this gross abnormality in 19,4, while studying sea urchins at Naples...
...Crudely or not, they still show it...
...Tenure prevented him from being fired outright...
...The theory is that gene mutations are the cause of cancer...
...The body's immune system does not recognize it as an intruder because it isn't...
...B efore telling me about aneuploidy, Duesberg said something about his background and interest in cancer...
...One or two of the cancer textbooks acknowledge that aneuploidy is common in tumors, but they say it's a consequence, not a cause...
...Four of seven m(Mels tested are so leak>' they caused false alarms in identical m~,lels from the same maker...
...At a certain point in its life-cycle the cell divides-half the cell's machinery is dedicated to this key function...
...Valentine One, in the same K-band test, warned at tnore than 4 0 0 0 f e e t . I[~ Bogus advertising claims...
...That is the view of the National Cancer Institute and other branches of the National Institutes of Health...
...liT] False alarms from sloppy engineering...
...Brinkley reserves a role for gene mutation, but he adds that "almost all human cancer cells are aneuploid, and it's still a puzzle why that should be...
...Some famous brands have so little filtering they were set off by six of the seven detectol,'s in the test...
...Altering just one enzyme activity rarely produces much effect.., but simultaneous alteration in many activities can overwhelm the normal controls...
...Aneuploidy we will come to, but the "recent study" was conducted by Robert A. Weinberg and his associates at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, and the study's findings are those advertised o*~ NCI's home page...
...Athel CornishBowden, an Englishman who directs a research institute in Marseilles, wrote recently in Nature Biotechnology: "Not only is the association between aneuploidy and cancer so close as to be virtually exact, but the predicted metabolic effect of over-expressing a large and arbitrary set of genes is just the collapse of normal regulation seen in cancer...
...For years, the medical establishment said that AIDS "puts us all at risk_" You had to be a trusting soul to believe that...
...Stem cells a little bit...
...It did, and it was published on March 28...
...So what is Duesberg saying now...
...But with cancer, yes, we do believe it...
...It appears that they are bystanders...
...Obviously, no one else does either...
...The president of South 3drica, Thabo Mbeki, has questioned AIDS himself, and having "trawled the Internet" as every news story parrots, he came across Duesberg's views...
...360" detection" isn't the only broken promise...
...They live for the whole...
...All of Duesherg's 11 grant applications to study his alternative view of cancer have been turned down by the NIH, just as all his existing grants were terminated once he questioned the consensus on AIDS...
...Its title is "Aneuploidy vs...
...There are two poles at the opposite ends of the cel], and a scaffold keeps them apart...
...He remarried a few years ago and has a four-year-old son...
...Natalie Angler allows, in a new introduction, that the mutant ras gene, a "nasty character, [is] found in about 25 percent of all human tumors...
...It's an anti-social element ifI ever saw one...
...But vaccinated people were tracked and no unusual cancer incidence was reported...
...He has studied cancer for decades and has written over 200 papers on the subject...
...Mutations are as common in the body as misprints in a text...
...However, the recent techniques of chromosome 'painting' with fluorescent dyes allows us to account for them individually, and with closer study it may turn out that they really are all aneuploid...
...Duesberg is happy to join up with the consensus with respect to carcinogens, and a well-known one, asbestos, illustrates how aneuploidy can be generated...
...gene mutation hypothesis of cancer: Recent study claims mutation but is found to support aneuploidy...
...In 1976, Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus of U.G...
...They are "aneuploid...
...I assured him I hadn't...
...Under special conditions, it could cause tumors...
...I'd be embarrassed i f Vnletttine One didn ~ do everything ! say it does...
...He still sa) s that the drug AZT kills more people than it cures...
...The indestructible fiber gets entangled with the spindle apparatus...
...Another who in part agrees is Dr...
...More important, after 15 years of trying, researchers have not shown that any combination of mutant genes, taken from tumors and put into normal cells, give rise to a new tumor...
...in chemistry from Goethe University in Frankfurt (1964), he was looking for "a hot issue in molecular biology that [ could work on before I settled down m some drug company to make fertilizers," he said...
...They are "diploid...
...It is made up solely of you...
...He is 6 3 no~, but he is still lean and vigorous, and in many ways youthful...
...The brand that claims "360 ~ Total Perimeter Protection" warned at 80 feet: another that merely claims "'360 ~ detection" warned at 30 feet...
...As with AIDS, the subsidized consensus on cancer tolerates little dissent...
...First they were preoccupied with retroviruses as the cause of cancer, then with genes...
...There was something very peculiar about this, as Duesberg said, because cancer is a group of growing cells, whereas AIDS is a group of dying cells (T-cells...
...Yet another with "360 degree detection" was "'virtually blind" to lidar from behind...
...The genes are the workers, and there are thousands of them on each assembly line...
...Lately, he has been studying the spindle apparatus...
...Brinkley, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Baylor College of Medicine...
...Aneuploidy is simple to understand...
...With many extra chromosomes-some tumor cells have double the proper complement--the various proteins produced by the genes will be amplified, or over-expressed, and the cell's control mechanisms may be lost...
...Duesberg asked me ifI had ever heard ofaneuploidy...
...He considered it to be the cause of cancer, though of course this left unanswered the important question of what might cause aneuploidy...
...carcinogens, including asbestos and tar products, are not mutagenic...
...Diploid cancers are virtually never described," Duesberg said...
...Duesberg compares the chromosomes to assembly lines in a car factory...
...Duesberg's views "desen,e more attention," he said...
...Their length is approximately equal to the diameter of the cell...
...But since the 196o's most researchers have not been interested in chromosomes...
...But cancer cells have an abnormal number of chromosomesusually too many...
...New detectors S}louJd be better than ohl detectors, right...
...Vnlentine One/ins a power cord because I don ~ know how to protect you without one...
...Asbestos fibers have been found and photographed inside tumor cells...
...In his side office he had unpacked a few books, including Robert Weinberg's Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer (1996...
...Leukemias are different...
...The unbalanced spindle apparatus is now more likely to propagate further errors in future cell divisions...
...I assured him that I hadn't...
...All other brottds lost range on X ottd K bands in the 90's zehen they added supeneide Ka...
...He opened a thick volume of references to thousands of papers on cancer and turned to the letter A. There was but one reference to aneuploidy...
...The department at the University of Heidelberg at Mannheim gave him lab space, research assistance, and full support...
...I might as well go back to cancer and give that a tty for my last ten years...
...But Duesberg now believes that all solid tumors consist of cells with preponderantly the wrong number, or the wrong complement, of chromosomes...
...They tend to dissolve the proteins needed to build the spindle, and during mitosis a few of the spindle cables will break," Duesberg said...
...Cancer ceils may sometimes have double the normal number of chromosomes...
...Shouh] detectors set off other detectors...
...He hasn't changed his view that AIDS is not infectious and is not caused by a retrovirus...
...One of the leading cancer researchers in the country, Weinberg and his cancer investigations were the subject of Natalie Angier's interesting book, Natural Obsessions...
...Onkos is Greek for mass...
...So Duesberg is still a heretic...
...Copycat articles followed in Time and Newsweek...
...The number of chromosomes in the cell was the main thing that was first noticed by cancer researchers when they started to look at tumor cells through the microscope...
...Two of tile m~lels that claim VG-2 invisibility could be found at one-fifth and thzeequarters miles away, respectively...
...Here we may glance at another book, co-authored by Harold Varmus and Weinberg...
...Notice all the ads claiming 360-degree protection...
...Berkeley, to a smaller lab downstairs...
...What's the difference between normal and cancer cells...
...Support for Duesberg's position comes from several quarters, but I will mention just two here...
...Normal human cells have 46 chromosomes, z 3 from each parent...
...That was one of the things I wanted to look at," Duesberg said...
...They write that some "relatively crude" studies--looking at tumor cells through an "ordinary light microscope"--showed that some chromosomes "were present in three or four copies, rather than the usual two, and others had been rearranged by deletion [or] inversion of segments...
...That is, they may have the right number, but the wrong complement of chromosomes...
...In 1997 I thought, well, I'm virtually fired, I have no more grants, so now I'm flee at last...
...The word "virtually" gives him an out, but he has not been able to find in the cancer literature of the last zo years a reference to solid tumors (in contrast to leukemia) with diploid cells...
...All mcMe]s were tested from behind with a K-band radar signal...
...In Genes and the Biology of Cancer 0993), Varmus and Weinberg do not entirely ignore chromosomes...
...Like good servants, they "know their place...
...Cordless" kills performance...
...A few are diploid...
...The Times article began: "Scientists report today that they have used a precise molecular recipe to turn normal human cells into cancer cells in the laboratory, triumphing in a task that sounded simple but that had eluded molecular biologists for more than 15 years, In the end, what was required was just three genes...
...some are, some are not aneuploid, and we will not pursue leukemia any frlrther...
...The original cell then divides into two "daughter" cells...
...Since he questioned AIDS, however, some of his papers have been quickly rejected...
...They don't even show that the suspect is at the scene of the crime," Duesberg commented, "let alone that it is guilty...
...With a Ph.D...
...By this time, Wendell Stanley was convinced that most cancers were caused by viruses--even though cancer has never been shown to be infectious...
...each one is doubled...
...Duesberg was invited to Berkeley as a post-doe, and he became a member of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology in 1968...
...You cut out half a liver today, and it will grow back incredibly fast...
...22 Jur~e 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator g Backsliding on X and K bands...
...It is precisely this ability of a central agency to de-fnnd dissent that creates a clirnate of intimidation around an orthodoxy...
...Attributing the new headline-making disease to a retrovirus that "put us all at risk" had the beneficial effect of keeping the retrovirology labs fidly funded...
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...Competition between theories, an indispensable part of scicnce, is stifled...
...The poles then send out fibers to each chromosome, and once they are all attached--"a mechanical miracle, if you think about it, but the cells can do it, God knows how"--the tension on the spindle fibers is increased and each set of chromosomes is pulled apart toward the opposite poles...
...How come researchers look for odd workers but ignore whole assembly lines7 It's hard to explain...
...Visit us on-line and experience the Radar Locator demo...
...it keeps on dividing, and the cancer cell is no longer differentiated-it is no longer a liver, kidney, or skin cell, but does its own thing...
...We went downstairs to his new lab, east-facing, without the grand view over the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate that hc enjoyed from his old lab...
...Nothing dramatic, like claiming to have found a cure...
...C/D compared all the new ones to two CVD test winners frnm the 80's...
...This is not just an occasional thing...
...In contrast to his AIDS message ("don't do drugs, don't take anti-HIV medicine, and forget about it"), he is not reassuring about cancer...
...In an}, event, an extra chromosome may end up being hauled offto one side of the cell, and one will be missing on the other side...
...Then the "spindle apparatus" comes into play...
...His study was published in the journal Nature last July, and on the day of publication the New York Times published a front-page story about it...
...Research into the causc of cancer has ~IbM BETHELL is TAS's Washington corres#ondent...
...He seilt overflows with streams of wisecracks and German-accented military, metaphors, and he is still very much the contrarian...
...If an organ is damaged, its cells know how to grow back and when to stop...
...He took a sabbatical...
...After the AIDS uproar began to die down, he decided to carry out a few experiments of his own...
...A second and final installment will appear next month...
...But more recently he sent them a paper whose implications were so important that the editors agreed to publish it if it passed peerreview...
...That won them the 1989 Nobel Prize, and the finding "shaped the modern view of cancer," Boyce Rensberger wrote in Life Itself...
...His latest book is The Noblest Triumph (St...
...First, the chromosomes replicate themselves...
...Leading textbooks on cell biology, including one by Bruce Alberts, James D. Watson, and others, contain no references to aneuploidy...
...On X and K bands, the two oldies "'tr~)uneed'" five of the six new detectors: only Valentine One beat the ohlies...
...But adding whole assembly lines, moving them around randomly, and bolting everything together at the end, gives you cars with five wheels, two engines, no dashboard, no brakes--you get a mess immediately...
...The experiments have now been done, and the results are "in press...
...One problem is that even the best known of these genes, such as ras and src (pronounced sarc), are found only in a small minority of tumors...
...The result is that the chromosomes are pulled apart unevenly...
...The cancer institute's home page reports that "NCI-funded investigators identified that alterations of only three gencs...are sufficient to transform a normal human ccll to one capable of producing a tumor...
...Martin's" Press...
...No one knows how...
...Duesberg is a member of the National Academy, and members usually get their papers published without peer review in the Proceedings...
...www.valentinel .corn "This is still the best protection money can buy by a long shot," said Car and Driver...
...S o, how might aneuploidy be related to cancer...
...If mutated, that gene was said to acquire cancercausing properties...
...Everybody said 'go west.' Everybody was saying 20 Ju~ e 2 o o o ' The American Spectator that they had recently found viruses that cause cancer...
...San Francisco discovered that a gene similar to one carried by the Rous Sarcoma Virus dwelt in human cells...
...But now he has embraced a new heresy, and it is one that should concern us all-cancer...
...One problem for the gene mutation theory is that many of the best known Since the 1960"s, most researchers have lost interest in chromosomes...
...One of the first to look He asked me if I had ever heard of aneuploidy...
...Normal cells are not granted any autonomy--virtually none," Duesberg said...
...So he wrote to Wendell Stanley, the first researcher to receive the Nobel Prize for the study of viruses, and whose portrait was on the wall of the library as we spoke...
...The tars associated with smoking also interfere with cell mitosis, this time because they are good solvents...
...Nothing on aneuploidy there...
...But normal cells are subject to a very strict hierarchy...
...That would be important...
...And there it stops for the next 4 ~ years if you leave it alone...
...hen operated on batteries, one eonlless model lost 20 percent of its X- and K-band range--modest to begin with--and was "'virtually ohlivious'" to instant-on Ka: the other lost about 30 percent range on all bands...
...Today, the NIH spends about $4 billion a \ear on cancer research, and since the \Var on Cancer began in 1971, maybe ten times that sum has been spent...
...The controls that regulate other cells do The American Spectator "Ju~e 2000 21 not register with it...
...Guess what...
...In particular, he invokes cell division, or mitosis...
...Then we went to his new lab, recently repainted and still bare...
...You will have a full liver back in a week or two...
...For his heresy, Duesberg is now required to teach an undergraduate lab course, and his department assigned him to the picnic committee...
...He has even been back in the news in connection with AIDS...
...O f course, no one else puts his personal reputation behiml a detector...
...Varmus recently finished a six-year tenure as director of NIH, and is now president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York...
...The cancer cell, on the other hand, lives for itself...
...He was being moved from his lab on the 5th floor of the Wendell Stanley Building at U.C...
Vol. 33 • June 2000 • No. 5
